8 ms·

It appears by "safety concerns" the author means "right wingers might be able to chat on the platform". I'm not sure Discord wants to put themselves in the pos

It appears by "safety concerns" the author means "right wingers might be able to chat on the platform". I'm not sure Discord wants to put themselves in the position of weaponizing their platform to suppress particular kinds of private political speech.

AFNobody 9y ago
More or less, yes. Fringe political views will get you permanently blocked by Discord and/or Twitter. I'm not a right-leaning person but even the concept speech should be free and uncensored if you aren't enabling a crime is an issue.
- superkuh 9y ago
  That's the problem with centralization, walled gardens, and proprietary protocols. You won't ever have a problem if you just don't go into the gardens. Self-host with mumble, teamspeak, matrix, or something. They all use the same Opus voice codec so it's not a quality issue.
  - akoncius 9y ago
    then why cellphones are not treated same way? SMS/calls should be analyzed and then people should be banned from network if something is “wrong”. And by “wrong” I’m not talking about organising a crime such as terrorist attack or something.
    - gsich 9y ago
      Because ISPs or mobile providers are not that retarded. They provide infrastructure, not content.
    - superkuh 9y ago
      Cell phone telco propviders have monopolies on radio spectrum that come with certain obligations, regulations, and conditions. That's in addition to inheriting the rules from land telephony and public infrastructure/title II stuff. You can bet that this kind of thing will happen if they can make it happen though.
  - AFNobody 9y ago
    Yeah, I use Riot/Matrix now and I can self-host it if I get disabled...but they don't mind if you don't give them a #/email so its really less of an issue there.
hsod 9y ago
Where are you getting "right wing" from? I saw this: > “Raiding and spamming is explicitly against our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines,”
- axlprose 9y ago
  Perhaps from this tidbit where the politics were explicitly mentioned in the article: > Resmini’s statement comes just a few months after Discord took action against a number of nefarious ALT-RIGHT servers. One of the largest servers, Centipede Central, became heavily monitored by Discord administrators and in the past few months, underwent its own implosion. And more importantly: > “The team has confirmed that they are aware of Centipede Central and will take action IF they find CC is in violation of their terms of service and/or community guidelines” In other words, it sounds like the politics of that group alone was probably enough to justify keeping them under close surveillance. It wasn't necessarily just responding to "raiding and spamming" once it happened.
  - tdb7893 9y ago
    The problem is that large portions of the alt-right ideology goes outside of politics into racism, misogyny, and harassment and it makes sense to keep a community with those traits under close surveillance. My view on the alt right is that there is a line between reasonable political views and spreading prejudice against certain demographics and the alt right really walks that line (I haven't been on this discord but a good example is the r/the_donald subreddit).
    - xupybd 9y ago
      The problem with the Alt-right on the internet is that they often are just trolls trying to be as offensive as possible. The actual alt-right political movement is just a very small group. I don't think many outside of that small group actually hold the racist and misogynistic views that are expressed on these forums. It's often just backlash at the rapid change in culture. People want to break the new rules of discourse. The bigger problem is genuine right wing views then get lumped in with the alt-right. Speakers like Ben Shapiro get called alt-right when their views are not racist or misogynistic. Before long people view many right wing views as hate speech. The more they do that the more people react by saying actually hateful things as a backlash. And so the divide grows.

AFNobody 9y ago

More or less, yes. Fringe political views will get you permanently blocked by Discord and/or Twitter. I'm not a right-leaning person but even the concept speech should be free and uncensored if you aren't enabling a crime is an issue.

superkuh 9y ago
That's the problem with centralization, walled gardens, and proprietary protocols. You won't ever have a problem if you just don't go into the gardens. Self-host with mumble, teamspeak, matrix, or something. They all use the same Opus voice codec so it's not a quality issue.
- akoncius 9y ago
  then why cellphones are not treated same way? SMS/calls should be analyzed and then people should be banned from network if something is “wrong”. And by “wrong” I’m not talking about organising a crime such as terrorist attack or something.
  - gsich 9y ago
    Because ISPs or mobile providers are not that retarded. They provide infrastructure, not content.
  - superkuh 9y ago
    Cell phone telco propviders have monopolies on radio spectrum that come with certain obligations, regulations, and conditions. That's in addition to inheriting the rules from land telephony and public infrastructure/title II stuff. You can bet that this kind of thing will happen if they can make it happen though.
- AFNobody 9y ago
  Yeah, I use Riot/Matrix now and I can self-host it if I get disabled...but they don't mind if you don't give them a #/email so its really less of an issue there.

hsod 9y ago

Where are you getting "right wing" from? I saw this: > “Raiding and spamming is explicitly against our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines,”

axlprose 9y ago
Perhaps from this tidbit where the politics were explicitly mentioned in the article: > Resmini’s statement comes just a few months after Discord took action against a number of nefarious ALT-RIGHT servers. One of the largest servers, Centipede Central, became heavily monitored by Discord administrators and in the past few months, underwent its own implosion. And more importantly: > “The team has confirmed that they are aware of Centipede Central and will take action IF they find CC is in violation of their terms of service and/or community guidelines” In other words, it sounds like the politics of that group alone was probably enough to justify keeping them under close surveillance. It wasn't necessarily just responding to "raiding and spamming" once it happened.
- tdb7893 9y ago
  The problem is that large portions of the alt-right ideology goes outside of politics into racism, misogyny, and harassment and it makes sense to keep a community with those traits under close surveillance. My view on the alt right is that there is a line between reasonable political views and spreading prejudice against certain demographics and the alt right really walks that line (I haven't been on this discord but a good example is the r/the_donald subreddit).
  - xupybd 9y ago
    The problem with the Alt-right on the internet is that they often are just trolls trying to be as offensive as possible. The actual alt-right political movement is just a very small group. I don't think many outside of that small group actually hold the racist and misogynistic views that are expressed on these forums. It's often just backlash at the rapid change in culture. People want to break the new rules of discourse. The bigger problem is genuine right wing views then get lumped in with the alt-right. Speakers like Ben Shapiro get called alt-right when their views are not racist or misogynistic. Before long people view many right wing views as hate speech. The more they do that the more people react by saying actually hateful things as a backlash. And so the divide grows.